People enjoy viewing photographs and other media on displays controlled by a computer. Existing computer hardware and software systems for displaying images are generally designed to focus the viewer's attention on a single image at a time. For example, a computer might display a single image at a time, stretching or shrinking the image to fill the display while maintaining the image's original aspect ratio (the proportional relationship between the image's width and height).
Historically, people have enjoyed viewing images that have been physically arranged in a collage. Various attempts have been made to let people view collages of images on a computer. In some cases, a system may allow a user to manually arrange images in a collage, but such a task consumes a great deal of the user's time and effort. Systems exist that can programmatically generate a collage of images, but current techniques suffer from a variety of deficiencies. In one aspect, programmatic approaches are computationally expensive and they make too many assumptions about the nature of images (e.g., require that all images have similar proportions. In another aspect, programmatic approaches may not allow for display of the entire image (an image may be cropped, or a significant portion of an image may obscured by another image) or generate results are not aesthetically pleasing (for example, there may be too much empty space). In another aspect, programmatic approaches can result in the generation of collages of completely random images that have nothing in common. Accordingly, these automatic collages are not generally interesting to view.
A common type of computer software image display application, generally referred to as a “screen saver,” displays information of visual interest on a computer display when a computer is not in use. Many screen savers exist that display a slideshow of images, typically showing a single image at a time. Screen savers have not generally attempted to display a slideshow of programmatically generated collages, presumably because of the deficiencies noted above.